"Good contemporary art reflects the society, and great contemporary art anticipates.” _ Don Marron
Her wide-open left eye directly confronts the viewer, while her right eye, positioned just above an exaggerated pink cheek and her ear, looks to the viewer’s left. The split gaze underscores the intricacies of the portrait while evoking the pluralities of Picasso’s many lovers.
Femme au beret et la collerette (Woman with Beret and Collar) was painted in 1937, the same year as the wildly celebrated Guernica, and Femme assise (Jacqueline), the greyscale depiction of Picasso's second wife and favorite muse.
The portraits are among more than 300 modern and contemporary masterpieces acquired over six decades by American financier and entrepreneur Don Marron, featured in Phaidon’s comprehensive Don Marron: Chronicle of Collecting: Acquavella, Gagosian, Pace. Available for $100, this lavish book invites us into the prized collection of one of the most intuitive, prolific, and savvy collectors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Marron’s family startled and shook up the blue chip art world and rattled the auction giants after he died from a heart attack December 6, 2019 at age 85, selling his prized collection in a joint venture by gallery behemoths Pace, Gagosian, and Acquavella.
Donald Baird Marron amassed his fortune as chairman and chief executive officer of Paine Webber & Co. from 1980 through the sale of the U.S. investment bank and stock brokerage firm to Swiss bank UBS for $10.8 billion in 2000. The deal handed Switzerland's leading bank access to millions of wealthy U.S. investors in what signaled a seismic shift for the global banking industry. The acquisition valued Marron’s stake in the company at $215 million.
In what’s become ubiquitous at financial services Goliaths, Marron helped to popularize the trend of displaying elite corporate art collections in sprawling offices.
Marron began collecting Hudson River School paintings in the 1960s, and quickly developed an affinity for acquiring modernists such as Paul Klee and then-contemporary masters including Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in the 1970s. He amassed more than 850 works by artists such as Jenny Holzer, Elizabeth Murray, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol, through PaineWebber to create what became the enviable UBS Art Collection that transformed the offices into a high-end gallery space. Many of those works were loaned or promised to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where Marron was a lifetime trustee and president emeritus.
Rauschenberg’s Photograph (1959) exemplifies his enthusiasm for found materials and his rebellion against Abstract Expressionism, which dominated the avant-garde U.S. art movement in the early 1950s. Rauschenberg’s mixed-media "combines" series reimagined collage, by subverting a medium to create syncopated grids that invite a narrative of the quotidian and art history.
Johns’ Two Paintings (2006) pushes us forward on the art historical journey, by examining this diptych borrowing from the pattern of the Harlequin’s checkered costume popularized in 17th century England and marrying a known pattern with abstraction.
Rauschenberg and Johns in 1961 severed a legendary love affair, citing irreconcilable professional, aesthetic, and romantic clashes. Learn more about how their relationship impacted their artistic practices at the groundbreaking, must-see Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, on view simultaneously at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and Philadelphia Museum of Art through February 13, 2021. The exhibition transforms art history with keen, meticulously researched curation, culminating some five-and-a-half years of collaboration between Scott Rothkopf, Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator at the Whitney, and Carlos Basualdo, Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and engagement with the 91-year-old American master.
Created in close collaboration by Acquavella, Gagosian, and Pace, Don Marron: Chronicle of Collecting features an introduction by Arne Glimcher, founder and chairman of Pace Gallery, along with insightful essays by Glenn D. Lowry, Director of the Museum of Modern Art, as well as an intimate tribute by Marron’s son William Marron.
